MPHO RANTAO
MEN’S fashion week has begun across Paris, New York, London and Milan; in a format that is odd to the fashion industry but has quickly become a casual sight due to the covid pandemic.
The now-mostly virtual shows by fashion week organisations have allowed creative directors free reign on how they wish to display their upcoming collections for the autumn/winter campaign.
Virgil Abloh’s anticipated collection for Louis Vuitton’s (LV) autumn/winter ready-to-wear collection took artistic inspiration from the vintage age of noir films, creating heavily-tailored looks with exaggerated fedora hats, oxford shoes and tailored suits in subdued earth tones – a direction that was far from the past eclectic collections presented by Abloh.
Titled Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light – the film introduces us to the protagonist as he moves through the gritty, abstract city, moving among a variety of loiterers, businessmen and regular commuters, all of whom create presumptions on the protagonist with suspicious glances based on his outfit.
Moving away from his trademark street style, the show began with poet and musician Saul Williams walking with a chrome briefcase and wearing a brown overcoat over his suit and adorned with a fedora while his voiceover spoke a quote from an essay titled Stranger in the Village.
“My Blackest self, whose whitest death, is luxury. I am no stranger anymore. The world is love to me”, Wiliams narrated.
Abloh told the media that his tailored collection was inspired by the above essay written by author James Bladwin, who wrote about his experiences as an African-American man in a Swiss Village in the USA.
Louis Vuitton’s show notes stated: “Virgil Abloh investigates the presumptions we make about people based on the way they dress: their cultural background, gender, and sexuality.”
“Within my practice, I contribute to a Black canon of culture and art and its preservation. This is why, to preserve my own output, I record it at length,” Abloh added in the show notes.
The models were dressed to the nines in their subdued hues of varied-length overcoats, pinstripe suits and monotone oxfords, created with leather, poplin, polyethylene, wool, silk; in a marbled print of the LV monogram.
